Joe And The Movie Factory

1. "Happy Endings". Writer/director Don Roos has shown himself in his previous films, "The Opposite Of Sex" and (to a lesser extent) "Bounce", to be an original, creative talent with a tendency to go for wrapping up plotlines too neatly and not always making all of his characters as fully rounded as all the others. Those same traits are in evidence in "Happy Endings", but this film is certainly a major step ahead of "Bounce", and the good parts of "Happy Endings" are SO inventive that I didn't really care about what was lacking.

This is another of those ever-more-popular multi-character films, in which a bunch of characters each interact in their seemingly separate story archs, until the connections they have with each other become apparent and they each begin turning up in each others' stories, all of them coming together for the big finale. In this case we have: a counselor at an abortion clinic (Lisa Kudrow), who is seeking information about the baby she gave up for adoption more than 15 years ago, her step-brother (Steve Coogan), part of a gay couple who is convinced that a lesbian couple they know used his partner's sperm to conceive their son, a conniving gold-digger (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who sets her sites on a lonely, wealthy widower (Tom Arnold), and a number of others.

A lot of reviews of this one have complained about the story-telling device in which the screen often splits and is filled on the right-hand side with Roos' comments on the action or information about the past and/or future of a given character. It must say something about my peculiar tastes that I found it very entertaining and thought it often added a nice touch of sarcastic humor to the proceedings. I was just as surprised as most to see what a genuinely touching dramatic performance Tom Arnold turned in, and I thought that Maggie Gyllenhaal (who has yet to disappoint even in her lesser films) took what could have been a stereotypical, one-dimensional character and gave her real heart and soul. Sharp dialogue, too.

Then there's that ending. Or, I should say, THOSE endings. With the number of characters whose stories this film tells, you'd think it wouldn't be possible to bring all of them to the same place (literally) and wrap allof them up neatly in just a few minutes, but Roos does it... and it comes off so utterly artificial that I wanted to groan, following the sharply-observed plotlines we'd been following up until then... this is even beyond the old sitcom "Everything is solved in a half-hour" formula. And the gay and lesbian characters, let's face it, are a bit more cartoonish that the others... especially surprising considering that Roos himself is out of the closet and proud of it.

But I found myself so wrapped up in so many of these characters and their dilemmas that I came away from the film glad that I had spent a couple of hours with them and their stories. Even if the resolutions are too simple, you genuinely like these charactes, even the ones who are much less than perfect, and you want to know how they wind up and hope for the best for them. That happens so rarely that I'm willing to cut the film some slack on its less satisfying elements. I'd still like to see where Roos goes next, and all of that is enough to earn "Happy Endings" a thumbs up from me.

2. "Wedding Crashers". No thumbs up HERE, folks. I've liked Vince Vaughn a lot inother films (he was just about the only thing worth watching in "Mr. And Mrs. Smith"), and Owen Wilson pretty well co-starring with Jackie Chan and in the Wes ANderson films (not to mention Christopher Walken in just about anything he's done), but this movie overpowers their best efforts.

This is the story of two divorce lawyers who use their off-hours mostly to crash weddings of total strangers in order to pick up women who will be especially vulnerable emotionally to their games. When they crash a wedding at the home of a prominent politician (Christopher Walken), though, they may have met the two women who could make them reconsider their ways and actually settle down.

Not the worst of plot concepts, and if the movie had taken the road of mocking the title characters and their emotional inadequacies it could have been a sharp little satire. But this is essentially one more slob comedy about a couple of low-lifes whose low-life ways are actually CELEBRATED right up until the moment they suddenly decide they need to change, and who even THEN never actually REGRET the shallow lives they've led or the emotional pain they've caused. And aside from Rachel ("The Notebook") Macadams as Wilson's love interest, there'snot a female in the case who isn't depicted as the kind of brainless ditz that could make the dimmest male look like ALbert Einstein. The deck is a bit stacked here, folks.

Vaughn and Wilson aren't nearly at their best, and even Walken seems to be operating on a lower voltage than usual. The dialogue is rarely funny, the "plot" is predictable to the extent that you'll know everything that will happen in the second half of the movie after the first 15 minutes, and there's something else fatal for a light comedy... it's way too long. No light comedy, as far as I'm concerned, should be very much longer than 90 minutes, and "Wedding Crashers" is just two minutes short of two hours.

Of course, if you were to cut everything out of "Wedding Crashers" that kept it from being a really funny film, you'd wind up with about 20 minutes' worth of a quite amusing short film about the incredibly eccentric members of Walken's family, who can actually make HIM seem normal. It's too bad there's no market for that kind of thing any more. It would really have been something. "Wedding Crashers" as is, is something too... something dull and not very much fun.

3. "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory". I enjoyed "Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory" (which I didn't actually see for the first time until it played a revival engagement at the Riverview in 2002), but I was fully aware of how much it diverged from Roal Dahl's orginal book, and have never had any problem with the idea of a more faithful remake. And it seems to me that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, along with Burton's usual composer, Danny Elfman, would be just the guys to do it. Turns out I was right... at least as I look at it, for what it's worth (which may not be much).

In case you didn't know the story: the mysterious, reclusive candy tycoon Willy Wonka holds a contest in which five children and one gues each are awarded a tour of his wonderland-like candy factory, with one of them getting a prize beyond their wildest imagination. The result is a children's story that's genuinely surreal, at times creepy and at times sweet (and I'm not referring to the candy). Burton makes a few false steps on the way, but not enough to fatally damage his film.

As likeable as the wonderful Gene Wilder was in the original film, Depp's strange, sometimes frightening oddball is much closer to the Willy Wonka of Dahl's novel, and the tone is closer to Dahl's usual "let's make the kids a little uneasy before we give them their happy ending" style than "WIlly Wonka". The children (except for Charlie himself) are even more clearly despicable, and you get the feeling that Dahl would have enjoyed this version much more.

What mistakes did Burton make? Chiefly, I think, in trying to supplu backstories for a number of the characters that never appeared in either the book or the original film. In particular, it got a little hard to take to watch Burton once again try to work through his issues about being abandoned by his father when he gives Wonka a similar family background... it worked well enough in "Big Fish", which was based on a novel ABOUT that subject, but it just doesn't fit into Willy Wonka's story. Of course, I probably shouldn't complain about any story element that allows Christopher Lee (as Wonka's father) to steal a few scenes.

Overall, though, this is a movie with a magical sense of fun that doesn't feel obliged to always present children with a rose-tinted view of the world. Tim Burton has always been at his best in strange, colorful worlds that might slightly resemble our own, but are definitely NOT ours... and that are populated by characters who are definitely un like any we know. In "Charlie & The Chocolate Factory", he's found a world created by someone else in which he seem totally at home, and manages to make his audience feel at home there for a couple of hours as well.